Thursday, May 19, 2016

Zollinger Adventures: Newport Edition of the Boston Chronicles

Greg STILL has paid paternity leave left, so last week we took a little jaunt over to Boston. Oh, yeah, and we stopped in Newport and Quincy and Old Orchard Beach and Portland too.

It was awesome.

I have loved living on the East Coast and having the opportunity to get to do things like this. Sometimes I think maybe I'm starting to take all the traveling for granted. Yes, it's been crazy to move so much in the last few years, but I wouldn't trade the experiences we've had for anything. There's a brief time in our lives when it's so easy for us to pick up and do things like this, and I'm happy we've taken advantage of it.

Plus, we have the cutest traveling companion ever.

This little baby is so easy, we can drag her just about anywhere. And we do. The other day we counted, and Brynn has been to 19 states so far, plus the District of Columbia. That's not including airports.

I have so many pictures and so many memories I want to store here on our little blog that I think I'm going to have to break up posts. Otherwise there would be about 200 pictures here and, let's face, that definitely qualifies as an overload.

First on our trip was Newport, Rhode Island. I've wanted to go here and see the mansion houses ever since my slightly-obsessed history teacher in the 10th grade showed us about 100 slides of him visiting the summer cottages of the Gilded Age millionaires. So there was no way I was going to pass this up. Newport is an adorable sea town on an island. We got tickets to tour The Breakers and Marble House, both built by Vanderbilts. They definitely did not disappoint.

The Breakers

So the Newport Historical Society has just barely started allowing people to take pictures inside the mansions, as long as you sign a release saying you won't sell the images. I felt pretty snazzy walkin' around with my fancy pantsy camera, signing releases and stuff.

Beautiful, right? And over the top, but also beautiful. It reminded me of that one time I went to Europe.

Funny story about this bathtub. It is made from a solid piece of marble. So to get it ready for some rich Vanderbilt guy to take a bath in it, they had to fill it and empty it multiple times to get it warm, because the marble would make the water cold instead of the other way around. Crazy.

The ocean view.

I think they have enough pots, don't you?

I'm still just amazed at the awesomeness that is my camera. I wish I was more confident in my ability to shoot in manual all the time, but I'm still learning. It's still pretty fun, though.

Marble House

The Gothic Room. It was basically a personal museum. Greg really liked this room, although I thought it was a little bit creepy.

The lowly servants' staircase.

Easily the best picture we took all day:

I love the ocean. Sigh. Guess I'd better move to Florida soon.

We decided this was an engraving honoring the Greek women who changed diapers. Look closely:

A great day with a great baby!

That night we drove into Boston and stayed next to Harvard, and the next day we did the Freedom Trail. I hope to get those pictures up tomorrow!

1 comment:

Your pictures are so great! I have wanted to see the Vanderbilt mansions since Mr. Garland's class too! He really was obsessed, wasn't he? Lots of good memories from Block History. I can't wait to see all of the pictures you took from your fun adventure!